{"id":972,"date":"2018-12-31T15:01:30","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=972"},"modified":"2018-12-31T15:01:30","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:01:30","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=972","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews<\/span> and Foreword Reviews, <\/span>writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine,<\/span> and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n
\n

B\u00e1rbara Renaud Gonz\u00e1lez<\/span> is a Tejana born in South Texas, who grew up in the Texas Panhandle. She graduated with a B.A. in social work from the University of Texas R\u00edo Grande Valley and a masters of social work from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She worked in Washington D.C., followed by postgraduate work at the Harvard Kennedy School, studying immigration and labor. Her novel, Golondrina, why did you leave me?,<\/span> was the first Chicana novel published by the University of Texas Press in 2009. Author of The Boy Made of Lightning,<\/span> an interactive children\u2019s book on the life of the late great voting rights activist, Willie Vel\u00e1squez, she is currently developing The (S)Hero\u2019s Journey,<\/span> a series of children\u2019s books about the marginalized (s)heroes of Texas, and finishing her first Tex-Mex adult fairy tale.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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CRITICISM\/HISTORY<\/p>\n

B\u00e1rbara Renaud Gonz\u00e1lez<\/span><\/p>\n

Las Nalgas de JLo\/JLo\u2019s Booty: The Best & Most Notorious Calumnas & Other Writing by the First Chicana Columnist in Texas 1995\u20132005<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Aztlan Libre Press<\/p>\n

Paperback, 978-0-9897-7823-7, 290 pgs., $24.00<\/p>\n

March 1, 2017<\/p>\n

B\u00e1rbara Renaud Gonz\u00e1lez writes deep and wide:<\/span> politics from the city council to the United Nations; culture and the appropriation thereof; the links between poor education and an ever-increasing prison population; the deference afforded to, and the outsized power of, big business; climate change, feminism, gender, sexuality, immigration, art, religion, identity\u2014you know, everything. But above all and always, class in our supposedly classless society.<\/p>\n

Las Nalgas de JLo\/JLo\u2019s Booty: The Best & Most Notorious Calumnas & Other Writing by the First Chicana Columnist in Texas 1995\u20132005<\/span><\/a><\/span> is the first collection of Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s writing. It includes columns, essays, poems, speeches, reviews, articles, and commentary from such outlets as the San Antonio Express-News,<\/span> the Los Angeles Times,<\/span> the Texas Observer, Z Magazine,<\/span> the Dallas Morning News, Ms. Magazine,<\/span> and NPR. Daughter of a Mexican mother and a Tejano father, Gonz\u00e1lez \u201ctried to share the conversations [her] community was having around the kitchen table.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gonz\u00e1lez calls out the malicious: \u201cIf you\u2019re poor, Black or Latino in this state, our racist history seasoned with our hang-em-high frontier, laced with an eye-for-an-eye Christianity has created a lethal stew of punishment and cruelty.\u201d She\u2019s acerbic with the nonsensical: \u201cit\u2019s ugly to be born brown, but it\u2019s a status thing if you are able to return the color of iced-tea from a visit to Canc\u00fan \u2026 Brown depends.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s relentless with the hypocritical: \u201cFor a man who hung out with lepers, [and] cripples, \u2026 Jesus [is] \u2026 now real close and personal with senators and governors \u2026 Jesus didn\u2019t die \u2026 for school vouchers as an answer to unequal public schools \u2026 If he were here today, he \u2026 wouldn\u2019t live very long before getting shot or going to jail.\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez educates the oblivious: \u201cWe acquire the trappings of the ethnic\u2014the spiritual retablos<\/span> and saints, and turquoise drops, the Spanish red roofs. We visit the Paseo of the Arboretum, the suburbs of Las Colinas, the fiestas<\/span> of summer \u2026 But as we continue to acquire, to feast and market a culture, we deny the existence of the culture\u2019s guardians\u2014those Mexican people who have become aliens on their own \u2026 we must examine and not just acquire the cultural effects that divide us \u2026 our culture [must not be] for consumption only.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s writing is unexpectedly lyrical. The frijoles negros<\/span> in Guatemala are like \u201ca chocolate breeze, a palmful of caviar, the flametip of cognac all at once.\u201d Barbacoa is \u201csilky and juicy and ay, how good it tastes, how the kids are laughing and the grease delicious, like memories slipping from the mouth to the chin to the table. Staining us with the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gonz\u00e1lez insists that we look and that we see. It can be disheartening and infuriating to read the dates on these pieces (\u201cBlaming the Immigrant,\u201d 1996) and realize how much remains the same: \u201cthere is here \u2026 yesterday has begun again.\u201d Las Nalgas de JLo <\/span>is an important collection, a gift, not for Texas, but especially for Texas.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews, writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine, and The Collagist. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}